REGISTER JOURNAL Striving for perfection can put you on the beaten path

(This is dedicated to a very special runner and friend of mine on the Cheshire cross country team.)

Pan Pan Fan

Published 12:00 am, Friday, September 19, 2003

Perfectionism is not worth your time.

I hate quitting, and I like winning. Sometimes, the combination of these two creates an unbearable stress both on my body and my mind  well, at least it used to.

My entire life, I have felt a need to study hard in school, work harder in music and the arts, and participate in sports. Once high school began, each activity in which I partook became increasingly more intense. When I added three seasons of running into the schedule during my junior year, with its AP classes, school activities and standardized testing, the result became four hours maximum of sleep per night, five nights a week.

Perhaps I didnt realize it then, but my body was not meant to function correctly with only four hours of sleep. Im also not a natural distance runner, which meant that for me to perform well, I still had to work my hardest every day at practice.

Being the competitive person that I am, my life was miserable. I woke up hoping every morning that I would stay awake in class; I ran each mile hoping that I would just finish; I practiced music mechanically with no enjoyment at all.

Not only did I strain drain my body of its energy, but I also strained my mental health. I became very sick the first month of cross country. However, I found myself ignoring my declining health. I told myself things like, "This is what my junior year should feel like," and "to get what you want, you have to put in 110 percent." Today, I look back on my futile attempts of perfecting myself in every aspect of my life and scorn them. As an athlete, I just felt the internal pressure of being able to master multi-tasking since quitting was never a thought I allowed myself to have.

Im not really sure exactly when my breaking point was, or that if I had one specifically. Perhaps it was a concept that took several months for me to gradually understand, but I know today that I must pick my battles (I hate the word "prioritize" so I made my own phrase).

Certain things are simply more important than others, and for me to succeed in what is really important, I must focus on that specifically with efficiency. The others, I just need to forget. No matter how you look at it, there will always and only be 24 hours in a day. Mathematically, I can do whatever I want with the categorizing of those hours (add them, subtract them, take the square root), but in the end, they will always add up to 24.

I learned in psychology class that perfectionists were considered to be pessimists. Im not in disagreement with that. The more I look at it, the more I realize the danger of perfectionism. In trying to succeed in everything, ultimately, very little will be accomplished. The result: a monstrous cycle of frustration and misery.

And so how am I doing today? This year, ironically, my schedule should be worse than it was last year (a more intense school schedule, a more competitive piano repertoire, and a more competitive running team all mixed in with the entire college application process).

However, my outlook and expectations for myself have completely changed, and I have learned to sacrifice.

For example, just this past week I had to tell my piano teacher that I was going to suspend playing for a month. With a tentative competition in January it was very painful, but Im proud of myself. Now, my only expectations are to enjoy every moment of the activities that I choose to do.

Not surprisingly, not only am I extremely happy (averaging 6-7 hours per night of sleep on the weekdays), but I also find myself succeeding more than I did in previous years. I love every activity I do.

Obviously, I am not encouraging anyone to settle for mediocrity when greatness is his or her potential.

I just want perfectionists to realize that there are more important aspects in life than just material success.

Sacrificing an activity so that you can focus on something else or giving yourself some rest time isnt "giving up." Its learning a lesson on how to live in this confined 24-hour life.

Having realized this, one of the best lessons I have learned in my junior year was the lesson on the unimportance of perfection and importance of happiness.

The other was the art of appreciating failure, but thats for the next issue.

Pan Pan Fan is a senior captain on the Cheshire girls cross country team.